More than 10 million people voted in favor of Elon Musk stepping down as chief executive of Twitter in a poll he posted on the site late on Sunday.
But the billionaire, who bought the company and installed himself as its head just 50 days ago, has insisted there is no successor in the wings. “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive,” he said on the social network. “There is no successor.” Replying to another user who said they could do the job, Musk added “you must like pain a lot. One catch: you have to invest your life savings on Twitter and it has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May. Still want the job?
On Sunday, Musk asked Twitter users whether he should step down as the head of the company, promising to abide by the results of his poll.
When the poll closed on Monday, 57.5% said he should step down.
As the majority owner of the privately held company, no one can force Musk out. But a series of baffling decisions over the past few days has caused even some of his closest backers to break ties with him.
A decision to ban an account that tracked the location of his private jet last week was followed by a mass suspension of critical journalists who reported on the ban. That led in turn to an exodus of some users engaged to other social networks, chiefly its decentralised competitor Mastodon, whose own account was banned for posting a link to the jet tracker’s account on the rival platform.
On Sunday, Musk reacted by banning all links to other social networks, including Mastodon, Instagram, Facebook, and even minor platforms such as Nostr, used by the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and Linktree, a homepage creation tool favored by influencers.
That ban was rescinded by the end of the day, following a Twitter poll from the Twitter Safety account, with Musk sayings that “Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again.” But the move was the final straw for some. Paul Graham, an Anglo-American venture capitalist who had just a month earlier backed Musk, saying “It’s remarkable how many people who’ve never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who’s run Tesla and SpaceX.” Graham also declared the move “the last straw” and told users they could find a link to his Mastodon profile on his personal website. His account was suspended for the post.
Musk has a history of using Twitter polls to rubber-stamp major decisions, selling a tenth of his Tesla holdings after one poll in 2021restoring Donald Trump’s account after a second last month and reinstating a swath of suspended accounts following a third. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”, Musk tweeted after the Trump poll.
But in many cases, he has given the impression of already having decided on the outcome before posting: he had already announced a sale of his Tesla holdings, for instance, long before he put it to a vote, and his plan to reinstate Donald Trump had been discussed since before he even bought Twitter. The decision to step down as chief executive had also been hinted at long before the Twitter poll was published. On November 16th, he told a Delaware judge that he planned to “reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time.”